Sunday, 10 September 2017

Making your own photo backdrop

As promised, this post is all about how I achieved the photo backdrop on Rozelle Street.

On my previous layout I'd used Haskell Backscenes' adhesive backdrops to depict a country NSW theme, however that wasn't going to cut it for an urban-themed, inner-city layout. A look through available commercial options from overseas backdrop manufacturers provided options that were too representative of their European or US origins. Sometimes you can cut corners and hide out-of-place details. Unfortunately there isn't much room for that on such a small layout.

While stumbling over a railway-related video from the National Film and Sound and Archive on Youtube (search for NFSA), I noticed a lot of their films featured large, panning shots of urban scenery. I figured that I could take a screenshot of this, edit it in very basically in paint, and print it out at Officeworks in colour.

After a week of sifting through the NFSA's Youtube archives, I found a film titled 'Rooftopics' which had just the right scene. Being from 1971 it was as close to my era as I was going to get.

So I grabbed this scene above, and after a few minutes using the rectangular 'select' tool in Microsoft Paint, had this:

One shot wasn't going to be long enough, so I needed to duplicate the scene without making it too obvious, like this:

I played around a little more with the select tool and came up with this:

Ultimately this one was better because it spread out the distance between the trees. Some of these and other features which stick out on the skyline, like the church bell tower or chimneys, were ultimately cut out as I went along to further break up the skyline. I made another scene which has the noticeable white apartment block in the last picture below. This is a key detail bringing the scene into a more modern era.

Once I had the scenes printed, I cut a few out and tried them for size and fit. The first one came out with too much of a blue hue, so after loading the picture into a Word document and playing around with the picture colour and contrast in Microsoft Word, I had the below, final outcome:

On the day of the exhibition, I marked the scenery heights on the back board lightly in pencil, and coated the back of the backscene printouts with a gluestick. After lining them up with the scenery markings, I applied them and gently smoothed out any wrinkles or air bubbles by hand.

I still need a fence either side of the factory to help with the transition from front to rear, but it's mostly done now.

So there you go, really easy and something anyone with basic computer skills, a glue stick and the internet can achieve!